The first one, which is that last one I finished, is William Vollmann’s Europe Central. I can’t give it a proper evaluation, because I didn’t read it fairly. I started it before Katrina. After Katrina took it from me, I bought it again and tried to continue, but it was too dense and bleak for me at that time. (A Confederacy of Dunces, which is partly responsible for bringing me to New Orleans in the first place, was serendipitously lying beside by my bed-in-exile, so I reread that, then started reading the NYT through every day. Confederacy helped; the NYT was a little bleak, you know.)

So, just very recently, I’ve been feeling pretty good, and I decided to go back to Europe Central. Vollmann uses his familiar imagined-history approach, but allows himself much more license for it than in his Seven Dreams. Here he imagines the lives of artists (Käthe Kollwitz, Roman Karmen, Dmitri Shostakovitch), military commanders (Andrey Vlasov, Friedrich Paulus), and others (most notably SS officer Kurt Gerstein) in an ambitious attempt to get at the nature of living with war and totalitarianism in the twentieth century.

Based only on the last third of it, which I just read, he largely succeeds. The prose is as good as anything he’s written. That last third follows Shostakovitch from the end of the war until his death; it ties into some things Vollmann has done nearer the beginning of the book, and I think to really appreciated it I’d need to read it through from the start again. In particular, I should pay more attention to the stretch about Käthe Kollwitz.

But I’m not going to any time soon. Instead, I’m rereading Vollmann’s The Rifles. This one gave me real trouble the first time through, but I since I seem to be in a good place for reading Vollmann, I’d like to see what I can get from it now.

]]> http://qblog.remarqs.net/2007/12/28/europe-central/feed/ 2